Last week’s "remarkable" testimony to a group of British parliamentarians by former FIFA Governance Committee Chair Miguel Maduro not only exposed the way FIFA, under President Gianni Infantino, "tried to exert influence on independent judicial bodies but also highlighted serious misgivings about FIFA’s electoral process," according to Andrew Warshaw of INSIDE WORLD FOOTBALL. It also "raised alarming questions about the extent to which FIFA may have turned a blind eye" to the way Hany Abo Rida, an ally of Infantino-backed Confederation of African Football President Ahmad, won his own place on the "all-powerful council." A few days before the FIFA Congress in Bahrain in May, the Egyptian FA, which Abo Rida chairs, hosted a party organized by the EFA's main sponsor, which afterward "flew delegates on to Bahrain on a private jet." In his testimony last week, Maduro declared that the events leading up to Rida’s victory, if true, would have been "a violation of the principles under which elections should take place" (INSIDE WORLD FOOTBALL, 9/18).
